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2021 Virtual DDA Meeting: Presentation Guidelines & FAQ

To adapt to the virtual meeting format, we are requiring that all abstract authors upload their talks or posters by May 4th. This will allow time for the videos and posters to be posted on the meeting platform and give participants time in the week leading up to the synchronous portion of the meeting to view talks and posters on their own schedule and submit questions ahead of time (questions can also be submitted in real time during the live Q&A sessions). Talks and posters will be grouped by sessions, and during the week of the meeting, we will schedule a few hours of live webinars per day for authors to answer questions and discuss their work. 

Note on pre-recorded talks: Below we have some suggestions for how to most easily record your talks (and provide details on file formats and maximum file sizes). The talk lengths listed below are upper limits. Please don't submit talks that are over that length! Note that the contributed talk length is shorter than the typical 15 minute time slot for in-person meetings because at our usual meetings that includes the Q&A time whereas here we are scheduling a separate, live Q&A panel discussion for each session.

Contributed Oral Presentations: Pre-recorded talks should be less than 10 minutes in length

Invited Talks: Pre-recorded talks should be less than 15 minutes in length. 

Posters: You will need to upload your poster as a PDF (no more than 50MB in size). We will share links to them on the password protected meeting page. Here's an example pdf poster. Poster authors will be scheduled for live Q&A sessions just like oral presentation authors.

Note on Q&A sessions: All presenters in the above three categories will be scheduled for a synchronous (live) Zoom Q&A session during the week of May 17-21. During this session you will be asked to provide a short, 1-minute summary of your poster to refresh the memories of attendees before taking questions. You are welcome to prepare 1 slide in PDF format for this summary. This slide should be sent to your session chair ahead of the session (posting it to the slack channel for your session is also encouraged!) as your chair will be handling all screen sharing. Session chairs will be contacting you as we get closer to the meeting. 

Asynchronous Posters: These posters should be formatted as above, but there will be no live webinar for Q&A. Instead, discussion of these posters will take place via Slack.

Plenary Prize Talks (Rubin and Brouwer): Synchronous (live) talks will be 35 minutes plus 10 minutes for questions. 

 

Details and Instructions for recorded talks:

The talks are going to be uploaded and shared with meeting registrants on the meeting platform via the AAS Vimeo account. They will be uploaded as "unlisted" videos that can only be played from the meeting platform (i.e., they will not publicly show up on the vimeo account channel and they will not be shareable via links).  Your talk is, of course, your own, so if you'd like to make it publicly available, you are free to do so and post it anywhere you'd like (we will still require your talk to be uploaded for the official Vimeo meeting channel)! After the conclusion of the DDA meeting, we will be happy to list your talk publicly via the AAS Vimeo account if you request that; we can also provide you with a link to share the talk more privately. 

File formats/sizes: Vimeo supports a variety of file formats, but MP4 files are preferred (this is what Vimeo will convert your video to, so starting there avoids conversion problems!). Other common accepted file formats are .MOV, .MPEG4, .M4V, .AVI, and .MMV (you can check Vimeo guidelines here. Please keep the total video file size under ~100 MB (most contributed talks should very easily be recorded in under 50 MB!). Include your name (and preferably also your session number) in the video file name!

Where to send your videos: Authors of accepted abstracts will receive instructions via email for uploading their talks. We are working with Warp Speed (who you might recognize from other AAS meetings) to handle all talk and poster uploads.

Suggested ways to record talks: You can record and edit your talk however you would like, but here are a few suggestions.

General note (which also applies to the Q&A webinars): Whether you want to include video/photos of yourself in your talk is completely up to you! Audio-only is completely acceptable for the recorded talks and for your webinar session.

Narrated PowerPoint Presentation: If you have access to Microsoft PowerPoint, this is a really nice way to record your talk. It requires some familiarity with PowerPoint, but it gives you the ability to edit your narration on a slide-by-slide basis (so if you're unhappy with just one section of your talk, you can easily fix it without re-recording the whole thing!). We used PowerPoint to put together and record a quick (~6 minute) presentation outlining the basics of this approach. The video is here, and you can download the example power point file that generated the video here. Microsoft has more detailed instructions here for recording PowerPoint presentations if you want to do something more advanced.

Narrated Keynote Presentation: If you prefer to use Apple's Keynote software, it provides similar options for recording your presentation (editorial note from Kat: despite being a Keynote user rather than a PowerPoint user, I found the options in PowerPoint to be easier to figure out and much more flexible than those in Keynote. Your mileage may vary, but it might be worth considering PowerPoint!). The official Instructions from Apple are here, and we made a quick tutorial video here.

Recording a using Zoom: If you want to keep it simple, or your preferred presentation software doesn't include any narration options, you can record your talk using Zoom. We've made a quick example video with basic instructions here. Detailed instructions for how to record meetings is available from Zoom.

Miscellaneous other options: The three recording methods above are the only ones we have tried and plan to demo, but we will add additional suggestions here as we come across them. If you are familiar with Panopto, they appear to offer a free in-browser way to record talks (see Panopto's website).